Tenancy and land speculation constitute a very serious economic menace and should be reduced to a minimum. But there is a more serious economic menace on the horizon which also involves the land, and follows when ownership and tenant systems break down; namely, corporation farming. Although this menace has not progressed very far, yet it is very serious because it is being promoted by the industrialized, urban-minded, mechanized, stock-gambling forces of this generation. The unsound, agricultural technique of corporation farming will ultimately bring this system to naught. But America, unless we do some thinking and take effective action, may try this unsound agriculture too, if for no other reason than that it makes so many promises under the aegis of our American economic idol, the corporation.

Corporation farming will in time destroy itself with its mechanical methods in a field essentially biological, but before this stupidity will reap its empty harvest, our American families will be finally and completely uprooted from the soil. All ownerships will pass to United Farms Incorporated. All rural skills, cultural patterns, traditions, communities will be obliterated. In many places, if not all places, the present farm population will be replaced by people not now engaged in agriculture, for the inefficient land corporations will have great need of imported cheap labor. They will have to reduce the populations in their wheat, corn, cotton, livestock, and fruit factories – their vast soil-mining territories. Any rural homesteads remaining on soil acquired by them will have to be removed. Gigantic, collectivized mass shelters will have to be provided for the men and women and children who will come to the company camps. These laborers may be left to camp on the roadsides as we have witnessed in California and Missouri. Homesteads for these people will be unthinkable. They entire corporation process will make it clear that in its philosophy the giant factory farm is more important than the farmer who it reduces to the status of the proletarian hired man. Tenancy does much harm to our rural population; but it remains for the land corporation to destroy the farm homes, reduce the farm families to serfs, and erase forever all the economic, social, and spiritual values in our traditionally free and independent, brave and democratic American rural life. This last octopus of Wall Street will drive the remaining families from the land and crush the enterprises upon which they have spent the best years of their life – the personally owned and controlled productive enterprises on which democracy is built. Senator Arthur Capper gives a correct report on corporation farming and its destructive implications when he says:

Corporation farming is bad public policy. It is dangerous… Every farmer and every business man in rural America and every worker in the big industrial centers should oppose it. I feel that we are justified by the facts as known and the possibilities of the future as indicated by those facts, in using every proper means to nip this corporate farming development before it gets firmly established.9

In the areas where farm corporations have picked up the title deeds to their 20,000- and 30,000-acre tracts, the experience of the man, the farm home, the farm family, the school, the church, the community has been a sad one. In these areas social and spiritual leaders have learned what to expect under a system of factory farming. These leaders know that their social, moral, and spiritual institutions are given but a small chance to establish themselves and can never hope to become vital factors in these rootless communities of landless people who are allowed to become even more transient than the harvest in their efforts to find work in the specialized farm factories.

Mark A. Dawber gives us a sound warning when he writes:

The maintenance of the family the year-round is not the overhead of farming. It is the overhead of civilization. Replace individual farmers with floating hands employed for a few months in the year and you might just as well nail shut the doors of the churches and the institutions of learning. Individual farmers, not floating farm hands, rear children and give opportunities for scholastic education.10

A picture of what he calls “floating farm hands” is graphically give us in these verses. It will not readily be forgotten.

THE MOVERS The East wind whips the skirts of the snow with a passing shower, and over Iowa on the first of March wheels churn hub deep in the mud or grit their teeth across the icy roads.

Home is only a shadow flying down the wind in a twisted swirl of snowflakes, traveling down the road in an old lumber wagon drawn by two shaggy horses whose bones are too big for their flesh.

Even the wild goose is not so homeless as these movers. Peering ahead through the sliding curtain of March rain they pass with the furniture of home packed in a wagon. Past corner, past grove, to the hilltop they go until only chairlegs point from the skyline like roots of trees torn from the earth. And they are gone…

The Rural Family In Mass Production This, the parade of the landless, the tenants, the dispossessed, but of their Canaan they march with Moses asleep in the Bible.

Who will call them back, who will ask: are you the chosen people, do you inherit only a backward glance and a cry and a heartbreak? Are you the meek? But the early twilight drops like a shawl on their shoulders and sullen water slowly fills the wagon ruts and the hoof prints. -James Hearst of Maplehearst, Country Men (The Prairie Press)

"An eye opening and heart touching portrait of a culture and industry that we are in great danger of losing. This book will help readers understand the urgency of preserving the Western ranchlands inhabited by families and rural communities that provide nourishing food for our nation, preserve a healthy natural environment and entrust that great American values will endure." - Mike Callicrate

An Endangered Species

Every month 1,000 ranches go out of production.
It's the national security issue that no one is talking about.

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Food Policy & Law

by John Munsell | Oct 11, 2011 OpinionEditor's Note: This is the first part in a series written by John Munsell of Miles City, MT, who explains how the small meat plant his family owned for 59 years ran afoul of USDA's meat inspection program. The events he writes about began a decade ago, but remain relevant today.

They say that confession is good for the soul. I've been involved in a series of ugly events since my plant in 2002 recalled 270 pounds of ground beef contaminated with E.coli O157:H7 and now want to admit the embarrassing truth for public review. more